Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Rauff: Jews hopeful, Arabs stressed at Allied advance

Walter Rauff, the inventor of the 'gas van' and a senior officer in Nazi occupied Tunisia, kept a detailed diary: it sheds light on arrangements for recruiting Jews into 24 forced labour camps. Following the defeat of the Wehrmacht at El-Alamein, Rauff commented that the Jews and the French were 'hopeful and happy' in hopes that the Allies would soon conquer Tunis. The Arabs were 'stressed and depressed'. Report in Y-Net News. (With thanks: Yoel)A new finding of the
diary kept by Walter Rauff, the Nazi colonel credited with masterminding
the "mobile gas chamber," sheds light on the Nazi conquest of Tunisia
that lasted from November 17, 1942 and up until 1943.
The high-ranking SS officer was one of three German
representatives who ruled Tunisia during that period. In his diary,
Rauff describes the various plans the SS considered for the Jews -
including using them has a human shields against approaching Allied
Forces.

Tunisia during Nazi occupation

Rauff's diary is a collection of reports and daily entries that
he sent from Tunisia to the Gestapo headquarters in Germany, and in them
he described what was happening around him.
Over the years, the diary was kept in London archives and
recently made its way to a documentation center for North African Jews,
and now has been translated into Hebrew.
"Today, Kesselring's order arrived to recruit Jews for the work
of building fortifications. In a meeting that took place with the acting
commander, we agreed on how to fulfill this order," he wrote.

Walter Rauff (centre)

"In the meantime, 3,000 Jews will be recruited by the operational
force. The arrival of the Jews to the work sites and their overseeing
will be the responsibility of the Wehrmacht (German forces). For this I
set up a committee of Jews that will be responsible for this process to
go smoothly.

"The first workers will be ready for work on the 7th of December in
the morning. I gave in order to mark all the Jews that are coming to the
work force with a yellow star. The financing, concern for food and
sleep will be done by the Jews themselves, without strain on the German
authorities. I announced that if the orders will not be completed,
severe reprisals should be expected," wrote Rauff.

In December, 1942 the high-ranking German officers gathered for a
crucial meeting. The topic was the draft ordinance for Jewish personnel
for the benefit of the German army in 24 forced labor camps across the
country. Thousands of Jewish youth were sent to these camps.
A few years earlier, Rauff had been involved in the invention of
the "gas van," a type of truck transformed into a mobile gas chamber
and used to annihilate Jews and others. It was the precursor of the gas
chambers in concentration camps, and some 200,000 people are believed to
have been murdered in this way.
In November, 1942, the
German-Italian forces, under the command of Erwin Rommel, were defeated
by Allied Forces in a battle known as "Al Alamein." Their defeat
prevented a second advance of the Axis forces into Egypt.
In the meantime, US forces had landed in Morocco and in Algeria as
part of "Operation Torch" and began to advance from Algeria toward the
border between Tunisia and Algeria.

In order to prevent a situation in which German-Italian forces
became trapped as they retreated from Libya, the Germans decided to
place numerous forces in Tunisia in order to create a wedge between the
incoming American troops advancing from east to west. This is how
Tunisia fell into the hands of the Germans.
Tunisia was the only Islamic country that came under direct German
occupation. During the six-month conquest, Tunisia was swept with war on
two fronts in the south and the north. Constant shelling took its toll
on the Tunisian people.

At the head of the Tunisian occupation stood Rauff, who commanded the entire Gestapo and deployment groups.

"Rauff did
not operate based on feelings and did not trust anyone," says Dr. Haim
Saadoun, who studied and translated Rauff's diary.
"He tries to become the central figure to determine German
policies in Tunisia, and does so in a strategic and organized way, with
the assumption that Germany will win the battle in Tunisia and by doing
so save the entire North African front for the Germans and the Italians.
"He is a rationalist, organized and extemely sophisticated. He
does not hurry to carry out his plans. He puts aside time to learn and
build Germany's policies and his place in Germany's hierarchy."
On November 25, 1942, Rauff expressed concern that the Jews and the French were conspiring against the Nazi forces.

"The atmosphere in the city is more hostile than on previous days.
The French and the Jews talk openly and say that in a short time enemy
forces will conquer the city. The atmosphere among the Jews and the
French is happy and hopeful, in contrast to the Arabs, who are very
stressed and depressed. (My emphasis - ed) The military situation, naturally, is completely
overshadowing the political situation."

Nine days later, Rauff sent another report, in which he came out
against the plan of Rudolf Rahn, who served as a German diplomat to
Tunisia. Rahn requested to turn the Jews into a sort of human shield
against Allied forces that were expected to reach the state.
"Today Rahn brought up in a meeting with the general the
possibility of deporting 70,000 Jews to the west, towards enemy forces. I
greatly warned against immediately putting this measure into practice,
because this type of move would fail in every respect.

Tunisian Jewish men taken to forced labor camps

"I proposed that in the meantime the Jews should be marked. The
decision has not yet been made, as it seems that the time has not
ripened for these steps and they will cause unrest that German forces
will not be able to handle," he wrote. Two days later it was decided to
send the Jews to forced labor camps.(...)

Tunisia during Nazi occupation

Yigal Halamit, who lives in Jerusalem today, was 12 years old at
the time, and living with a family in Tunisia. "I remember that there
was almost no food, I would stand every day for hours in a line in order
to get bread."
"Our neighbors were kicked out of their home, my uncle was taken
hostage and overall we lived with twice the fear – on the one hand the
Germans, and on the other the aerial bombings by the Allied Forces that
devastated the city. We had to go sleep in a store with a basement
because there were no shelters then. The Germans took all the Jews over
the age of 18 to work camps, among them my two older brothers."
(Clement ) Hori (a Tunisian Jew), also wrote in his diary about the recruitment of the Jews
of Tunisia to labor camps and describes the meeting of the recruitment
committee during which Rauff demanded that the Jewish community levy the
cost of the equipment, food and wages of the Jewish workers.
"The prescribed amount is 20 million a month and the wealthy
Jews were required to band together and take care of collecting this
amount in order to satisfy the immediate demands. It seems that their
demand was made and carried out," Hori wrote in his diary.
Hori also wrote of a young worker who disappeared one night, and
arrived the next day after being captured while hunting and taken to a
work camp. "He also said that 500 people were given only five water
bottles and that everyone got one bun for dinner, each worth one penny.
They spent the entire night outside, under the hood of the sky and
pouring rain. Simply horrible! Barbarianism that fits the 15th century
and we are living in the 20th!"

On the second week of December 1942, both diaries depict the German decision to ban Jews from owning radios.
Rauf writes in his diary on December 12: "According to the
command of the supreme commander, today the ban begins on radio devices
for the Jews, except for the radios of Jewish Italians. This move is
being carried out smoothly, with the support and help of the French
police. The confiscated devices are available to the German forces."
The confiscation of the radios had two purposes, says Dr.
Saadoun. "One was to prevent the Jews from hearing what is going on in
Europe and the second was to enable the Germans to stay up-to-date on
what is happening on the North African front, through BBC coverage."
Halamit added: "There were huge placards in the street that called on
all Jewish males to register. My father and mother were very worried
about the fate of my brothers who had been sent off - we had no contact
with them. There were people from the community who took care of food
for them and they sent us reports on my brothers' fate. About what was
happening then in Europe we had no idea, we had no clue. I personally
found out only two years later. I was shocked, we were all in
astonishment."

The subject of the Jews – as much as it was important to the Nazis,
became less significant to the Germans as the Allied Forces made their
way closer to Tunisia.

Their prime concern was their inability to combat the Allied Forces,
keep their commitments to Italy and their relationship with the French
government and the Arab Tunisian Government, which continued to function
in Tunisia.

In his diary, Rauff described the Arab population and its cooperation
with the Nazis. "In the border regions the atmosphere is similar to
that in Tunis: The French community assumes that the enemy forces will
arrive soon and are awaiting it; the Arab community is friendly towards
the Germans and is willing to help."

"The Arabs that we took to accompany us on the drive from the
airport to the city were immediately released when we arrived, and they
were given instructions to continue with their old ways, discover the
general atmosphere and send us the addresses of the Jews whose homes and
cars would suit our needs. The recruitment of Jews for work had a
positive impact on the atmosphere in the Arab sector."

The cooperation of the Arabs was not enough to help the Germans, who
were eventually defeated by the Allied Forces. At the end of March 1942,
Rauff sent his final reports to the Gestapo commander in Germany – just
before he escaped with the rest of the high-ranking officials in
Tunisia.

Rauff made his way to Milan, Italy about two months before Tunisia
was liberated from German occupation, but was caught by the Allied
Forces. In December 1946, he managed to escape from a prisoner of war
camp and was hidden at a monastery in Rome.

He succeeded in fleeing Italy, and in 1948 he was drafted into the
Syrian intelligence service. Rauff lived in Damascus for a year, before
moving onto Ecuador and eventually settling in Chile.

Extradition requests submitted by the Federal Republic of Germany in
1963 at the request of the Simon Wiesenthal Center were turned down by
Chile. The Chilean Supreme Court declined on the grounds that the
country's laws applied to the crimes Rauff was accused of committing,
and that the statue of limitations had expired.

It's not that they were happy over Jewish suffering, it's that indigenous Jews were back down to their rightly place, being humiliated as required by the country's religion.

Not to forget that Tunisia like Morocco, were not colonies, and therefore the country's religious law was still in force.

I heard very recently in a radio program (I don't remember which one) someone who said that during the British administration of Egypt, the most common Muslim complaint to the authorities was that Jews have become arrogant and forgot their place.

Be that as it may, I confirm that the historian Georges Bensoussan said what you wrote in your last paragraph about Muslim complaints to the British in Egypt in a lecture a year or so ago. The lecture is available on youtube, I believe.

Sylvia, I understand that even in Algeria (which was considered metropolitan France and where Jews were full citizens) Jewish rights were not restored by the Americans in 1942 'for fear of stirring up the Arab population'.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)